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Taiwan, where Hakka is the native language of a significant minority of the island's residents, is a center for the study and preservation of the language. Pronunciation differences exist between the Taiwanese Hakka dialects and Mainland China's Hakka dialects; even in Taiwan, two major local varieties of Hakka exist.

History

Early history

It is commonly believed that Hakka people have their origins in several episodes of migration from northern China into southern China during periods of war and civil unrest[9] dating back as far as the end of Western Jin.[10] The forebears of the Hakka came from present-day Central Plains provinces of Henan and Shaanxi, and brought with them features of Chinese varieties spoken in those areas during that time. (Since then, the speech in those regions has evolved into dialects of modern Mandarin). The presence of many archaic features occur in modern Hakka, including final consonants -p -t -k, as are found in other modern southern Chinese varieties, but which have been lost in Mandarin.

Due to the migration of its speakers, Hakka may have been influenced by other language areas through which the Hakka-speaking forebears migrated. For instance, common vocabulary is found in Hakka, Min, and the She (Hmong–Mien) languages.[citation needed] Today, most She people in Fujian and Zhejiang speak Shehua, which is closely related to Hakka.

Linguistic development

A regular pattern of sound change can generally be detected in Hakka, as in most Chinese varieties, of the derivation of phonemes from earlier forms of Chinese. Some examples:

Characters such as 武 (war, martial arts) or 屋 (room, house), are pronounced roughly mwio and uk (mjuX and ʔuwk in Baxter's transcription) in Early Middle Chinese, have an initial v phoneme in Hakka, being vu and vuk in Hakka respectively. Like in Mandarin, labiodentalisation process also changed mj- to a w-like sound in Hakka before grave vowels, while Cantonese retained the original distinction (compare Mandarin 武 wǔ, 屋 wū, Cantonese 武 mou5, 屋 uk1).

Phonology

Dialects

Hakka has as many regional dialects as there are counties with Hakka speakers as the majority. Some of these Hakka dialects are not mutually intelligible with each other. Surrounding Meixian are the counties of Pingyuan, Dabu, Jiaoling, Xingning, Wuhua, and Fengshun. Each is said to have its own special phonological points of interest. For instance, Xingning lacks the codas [-m] and [-p]. These have merged into [-n] and [-t], respectively. Further away from Meixian, the Hong Kong dialect lacks the [-u-] medial, so, whereas Meixian pronounces the character 光 as [kwɔŋ˦], Hong Kong Hakka dialect pronounces it as [kɔŋ˧], which is similar to the Hakka spoken in neighbouring Shenzhen.

As much as endings and vowels are important, the tones also vary across the dialects of Hakka. The majority of Hakka dialects have six tones. However, there are dialects which have lost all of their checked tone (Ru Sheng), and the characters originally of this tone class are distributed across the non-Ru tones. Such a dialect is Changting which is situated in the Western Fujian province. Moreover, there is evidence of the retention of an earlier Hakka tone system in the dialects of Haifeng and Lufeng situated on coastal south eastern Guangdong province. They contain a yin-yang splitting in the Qu tone, giving rise to seven tones in all (with yin-yang registers in Ping and Ru tones and a Shang tone).

In Taiwan, there are two main dialects: Sixian and Hailu (alternatively known as Haifeng). Most Hakka dialect speakers found on Taiwan originated from these two regions. Sixian speakers come from Jiaying Prefecture (Chinese: 嘉應), mainly from the four counties of Chengxiang (now Meixian), Zhengping (now Jiaoling), Xingning and Pingyuan. The Hailu dialect contains postalveolar consonants ([tʃ], [tʃʰ], [ʃ] and [ʒ]), which are uncommon in other southern Chinese varieties. Wuhua, Dabu, and Xingning dialects have two sets of fricatives and affricates.

Vocabulary

Like other southern Chinese varieties, Hakka retains single syllable words from earlier stages of Chinese; thus a large number of syllables are distinguished by tone and final consonant. This reduces the need for compounding or making words of more than one syllable. However, it is also similar to other Chinese varieties in having words which are made from more than one syllable.

Hakka prefers the verb [kɔŋ˧˩]講 when referring to saying rather than the Mandarin shuō說 (Hakka [sɔt˩]).

Hakka uses [sit˥]食, like Cantonese [sɪk˨] for the verb "to eat" and 飲[jɐm˧˥] (Hakka [jim˧˩]) for "to drink", unlike Mandarin which prefers chī吃 (Hakka [kʰiɛt˩]) as "to eat" and hē喝 (Hakka [hɔt˩]) as "to drink" where the meanings in Hakka are different, to stutter and to be thirsty respectively.

Examples

Hakka hanzi

IPA

English

阿妹，若姆去投墟轉來唔曾？

[a˦ mɔi˥, ɲja˦ mi˦ hi˥ tʰju˩ hi˦ tsɔn˧˩ lɔi˩ m˦ tsʰɛn˩]

Has your mother returned from going to the market yet, child?

其老弟捉到隻蛘葉來搞。

[kja˦ lau˧˩ tʰai˦ tsuk˧ tau˧˩ tsak˩ jɔŋ�� jap˥ lɔi˩ kau˧˩]

His/her younger brother caught a butterfly to play with.

好冷阿，水桶个水敢凝冰阿。

[hau˧˩ laŋ˦ ɔ˦, sui˧˩ tʰuŋ˧ kai˥˧ sui˧˩ kam˦ kʰɛn˩ pɛn˦ ɔ˦]

It's very cold, the water in the bucket has frozen over.

Writing systems

Various dialects of Hakka have been written in a number of Latin orthographies, largely for religious purposes, since at least the mid-19th century.